Alison nodded into the soft acrylic fur that smelled of her hair. ‘I don’t know, though,’ she said.
‘Don’t know what?’ She felt Gina go still, waiting.
‘I don’t know if he did do it,’ Alison said, muffled.
And then abruptly she was pushed away, back into the air.
‘You what?’ Gina’s face was suddenly changed, alert. ‘You are joking?’
‘Joking?’ She repeated the word in wonder. Gina grimaced impatiently. ‘I didn’t see him do it,’ said Alison, and it was an effort not to close her eyes to blot out what she did see. ‘I heard … I don’t know what I heard. His glasses. I found them in the yard. There was…’ She felt herself begin to tremble: subdued it. ‘My mum.’ Unfaithful.
She started again. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. She was in the kitchen wearing her best skirt. I think … I think…’ Gina had both hands on her shoulders now, her face rough.
‘What?’ said Gina. ‘You better be sure. Because if it wasn’t him … fuck. Why did you come back?’ Her voice was strained with fear. ‘Why?’
And finally it was out, like something that had been choking her. Alison said, ‘I think there was someone else there.’ She stood abruptly, looking out over the marsh. She saw the white and fluorescent shape of a car over to the north beyond the crooked house. Mulville’s Hard, the name came back to her from long ago – and then again, from this morning. Simon Chatwin had been talking about the police at Mulville’s Hard. Eight hours, give or take, he’d said, and understanding began to tick down. Something had been there eight hours, waiting for the police to find it.
But Gina was turning away, looking away, and the child stood in front of them, solemn, brushing the hair from her face.
Narrow little face, something strange and beautiful, something different, the barest hint of Gina in the set of her mouth, otherwise she was all her father’s.
‘She’s…’ Alison looked from the girl to Gina and back. ‘She’s his.’ The girl whirled and was gone. ‘She’s Simon’s.’
For a moment her face seemed to close against Alison, boarded like the house, swept blank as the marsh. Get out, it said. Stay out.
‘She’s mine,’ said Gina.
* * *
The night, that last night of her old life had started so well: midsummer and the bright day lingered on and on, a day that would never end. A cool grey-blue evening, the tide still high and bringing with it the glitter of the open sea; it was lapping under the sea wall as she left the house, a sound like a whisper, like a kiss. Esme rode at breakneck speed up the bumpy path to Gina’s house, her mouth smiling wide with joy and a secret bubble of it in her chest.
She had no lights for the bike, but it was midsummer and here on the edge of the world it never got dark. She rode through the village in triumph. She had been kissed. Behind her, home dwindled. Dad at the pub, Mum in the kitchen, only shrugging, nothing new. Esme stood up on the pedals, her hair blowing back, and she flew.
It wasn’t that it was Simon she wanted. She tried to say that to Gina, but it seemed to make it worse. She looked for him as she flew: a man stood on a street corner, not him, but his head turned to watch her go.
The high street was quiet, the long twilight subdued everything to shadows and murmured voices in back gardens, but as Esme came round the bus shelter she saw them there, inside. The brothers. Sobered, she sat back down in the saddle, freewheeling past, turning her head. Danny and Martin Watts. The younger boy, Danny, tough and golden and beautiful, was standing stiff and upright with an arm around his taller brother. Martin the older one, his face roughened already with misery and weather, head bent and shaking from side to side. Danny stared back at her as she passed, over his brother’s shoulder.
It had been more than six months since their little brother, Joshua, died. Martin was the oldest by three years but it had been him that had lost it at the funeral, standing up jerky and ranting in the pew in the middle of the first reading. Yelling about murder. Joe had been there, as the friend of Joshua and Danny both, but he’d said nothing when he got home red-eyed, only pounded upstairs and banged his bedroom door. Mum looking stricken in the kitchen all day. Esme had wanted to go to the funeral but Mum had said no. They don’t want a mob there, and Dad for once had backed her up. Esme had overheard an old woman talking about it in the shop as she lurked by the biscuits, weeks later: They say Cathy Watts’s older one’s on sleeping pills and all sorts.
And there was something in the sag of his shoulders as she went by, something in Danny’s warning look that said Martin wasn’t right, he might never be right. Danny had a place at university already sorted, he could go, he could fly. It’s OK, she wanted to say as she freewheeled past, you can fly, like me, only there was his brother’s head on his shoulder.
Gina’s house was silent and dark but she was there all right, smoking in the back garden among the weeds, sat up against the broken fence flicking ash into a shard of flowerpot. There was an alley that led to the back gardens and a field beyond it that sloped down to the estuary, because everywhere did in Saltleigh: all roads led to the water. The village was on a muddy peninsula that narrowed to the church on its spit, the sea wall snaking off to either side, advancing and retreating according to mysterious laws, around the ruins of farmsteads, the fossilised stumps of Saxon villages. Gina looked up at the sound of the gate, her face smooth and abstracted and peaceful for once and Esme sniffed the heavy-scented smoke, as telltale as Gina’s expression. Gina held up the joint and Esme took it from her.
They headed upstairs to her bedroom, Esme shouldering her little backpack that held pyjamas and make-up bag and hair straighteners. Because she didn’t forget the straighteners, she could never have. Gina with her thick stiff crazy hair had an obsession with them, along with a boy she wouldn’t name to Esme. She would only scowl when Esme tried to worm it out of her.
Light-headed from the smoke, Esme dropped her bag and subsided onto Gina’s unmade bed. It smelled of him, she realised, or he smelled of it, Simon’s hair, his neck where he’d held her against him. Dope. She should have thought then, perhaps, that it might be from him that Gina got the stuff. And the mushrooms she held out reverently once she’d parked herself at Esme’s side on the bed, folded in a Kleenex, grey and dusty and dull-looking.
‘I’ve made them into tea,’ said Gina, reaching for a flask and unscrewing it: an odd smell was released, of dead leaves and earth. ‘Show us, then. You bring them straighteners? You did, didn’t you?’
And Esme had shaken her head in a sudden access of mischief she’d never have dared without the dope scorching her insides. ‘Maybe I forgot,’ she said. ‘You guess something first. You guess.’
‘Guess what?’ Gina angrily pushing the hair back from her face, a warning sign.
‘Guess who.’
And that was when it began to go wrong.
Esme never told, she never knew what Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford had said to Gina or learned from her. She’d stuck to it being the straighteners because anything else would have tied her into knots, trying not to mention the dope, the slopping tea Gina had pushed into her hand with a fierce jeer, the way her friend had finally flared up, her face burning, No you never, you stupid, you stupid little …
So it must have been Simon Gina was after, all those years ago. Simon had been her secret.
And what difference, anyway, did it make? Because what Sarah Rutherford really wanted to know was not why she’d come home but who knew. Who knew she was supposed to be at Gina’s that night, and who knew she had come back home? Did she see anyone, did she tell anyone, would anyone have heard them argue, or seen her fly out again, rattling down the cool blue high street on her bicycle with her backpack hanging from the handlebars, in too much of a blind hurry even to put her arms through the straps?
Martin Watts had gone to bed early that night, he’d taken sleeping tablets. Danny had said so when he’d given evidence at the coroner’s inquest, called because he
’d gone to the police with his mother to say he’d heard shots across the marsh. Their house was behind the boatyard and sound carried across the water in odd echoes and eddies – sometimes you could hear laughter from as far as Power Station Beach. Danny hadn’t looked at Esme from the wooden witness box as he told them, but she’d looked at him. It was Power Station Beach she thought of, her and Joe and the Wattses the summer before and Esme hiding in the marram grass, realising as they wrangled that something had changed, she was too big, too grown to be one of the boys anymore. And Joe was made uncomfortable by her being along. In the courtroom she’d seen that Danny had always looked a lot like his little brother, she just hadn’t seen it before.
Who knew she’d come home? She’d just shaken her head to Sarah Rutherford, no one. Danny and Martin had seen her head up the high street to Gina’s but they hadn’t been there when she’d flown back down it, burning, shame burning her from the inside, her hair on end.
Later, that ride came back to her at odd moments, in waking dreams and nightmares, the downward ride through the village with its shadows and whispering, out along the path towards the crooked house. Plunging into darkness, her last ride home.
Chapter Sixteen
There was a smell of pub lunch when she walked back into the hotel after midday. In their room Paul rose quickly from the little writing table where he’d been working: he seemed surprised to see her back, as if he’d forgotten he wasn’t on his own. He could live without her. But then he stretched and held out his arms and she entered them, grateful he couldn’t see her expression.
Had she imagined that look on Gina’s face? It had gone almost as soon as it appeared. She had only shrugged, while Alison calculated. The child was eight, nine; Gina must have had her at seventeen.
‘It never lasted with Simon,’ she said. Then added, ‘Thank Christ. I don’t know what I thought I was up to.’ The girl had run off again. ‘She’s called May. Month she was born, I couldn’t think of anything else but it stuck. May.’ She stared away, the child dancing against the sky reflected in her eyes.
‘So we fell out over nothing,’ Alison said, ‘if you never wanted him that badly.’
Gina looked at her, thoughtful. ‘You could say that,’ she said. ‘If it hadn’t all gone tits up that night we’d probably have been all right. You mightn’t ever have got out of here. Think of that. Out of this dump.’
‘You still at your dad’s?’ asked Alison then, and Gina stared at her a moment before shaking her head.
‘Council give us a place on Western Avenue,’ she said. ‘Two beds, new kitchen an’ all.’ Contemptuous of anyone for being such a soft touch as to house a wildcat and her kid. Same old Gina.
‘That’s where the baby died,’ said Alison, automatically.
Gina’s head swivelled. ‘You remember that?’ she said warily. ‘The fire?’
Alison nodded. ‘It was in the paper,’ she said. ‘It made Mum cry.’ Her memory stirred, like dust rising. It had made her father cry too, she remembered now, big gulping sobs at the kitchen table. Drunk crying didn’t count. ‘What happened to them?’
‘The father topped himself,’ Gina said shortly, fumbling in her pocket for the fag packet again. ‘You don’t remember that? Week before your dad … before. Frank Marshall. He’d done the rewiring himself to save money – they weren’t council, see. It was electrical.’ She squinted around the cigarette. ‘She’s still around, somewhere.’
Gina didn’t hug her when she went, the arms round her shoulders had been a one-off. She’d never been one for softness, not like that, she’d always been more of a puncher and a shover for showing affection. When Alison turned at the playground gate she saw Gina standing beside her child, looking down into her face. She couldn’t see Gina’s expression but May was rapt, searching.
Walking back she’d looked in her bag for the scarf again, but it really wasn’t there. It nagged at her, knocking her off course. It would turn up. She wished she felt safe without it, but she didn’t.
She looked up into Paul’s face now. ‘Lunch?’ he said, wary. ‘Or are you running off again?’
On the stairs she asked him, but he hadn’t seen her scarf. They sat in the hotel bar and ate something deep-fried beside a window that looked into the garden, and talked about Paul’s morning. A breakthrough in his research, apparently. He ate quickly as he described it to her, fired up. He’d uncovered a witness statement to a massacre in Northern France in 1944 that no one had seen before. Once or twice, watching his face lit up, last night came back to her, the distinct memory that he had wanted to hurt her and that she had colluded, but he showed no sign. Was that how it worked? Their secret violent life, under the civilised meals and books and quiet conversation. It sat inside her, mysterious, wrong, fascinating. She allowed a knot of resistance to form against it. No.
Alison worked her way through the food; it took about half a plateful before she remembered the fried clusters were fish. She made herself taste the stuff, made herself enjoy it. Salty, greasy, delicious. She kept an eye on the grass through the window in case Simon Chatwin walked past again, but he didn’t appear. The thought of him turned her stomach, she didn’t know why, but at least she could be fairly sure he hadn’t recognised her.
‘Does he see her?’ she’d asked Gina. ‘Does Simon see his daughter?’
A quick shake of the head and Gina had looked away. ‘Not him. He’s on a lot of medication.’ Hunched on the slide. ‘Prozac, that sort of shit.’ A quick glance at Alison. ‘He went off the rails. Too much dope. Or something.’
She would need the car again, she realised, as she forked the scampi into her mouth, calculating how she might put that to Paul.
‘You wolfed that,’ he said, amused, pushing his plate away. A pause. ‘Not pregnant?’ Smiling.
‘What?’ Mouth full, Alison laid her fork down, swallowed. ‘What kind of a question is that? Of course I’m not pregnant.’ They had never had a contraception conversation: she took care of it and she assumed he had worked that out. She felt an odd shiver as she saw she should have wondered why he’d never felt the need to make sure.
Paul shrugged, unruffled. ‘Something’s different, though,’ he said. ‘Since we got here.’
Alison coloured. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Sea air.’
He looked at her a moment then turned to signal to the girl behind the bar. ‘So,’ he said, turning back to Alison, ‘you want the car this afternoon? While I’m at the rehearsal.’ He grimaced. ‘You can drop me at the church, if you like.’ And then he smiled properly, the modest, determined smile that by now was familiar, the line appearing at the side of his mouth. He leaned in and kissed her as the waitress appeared.
Chapter Seventeen
Alison felt like she was in the car with something dangerous, a bottle of poison or a snake. She held the big buff envelope in both hands, it smelled of offices, of institutions, nothing more sinister, but that was sinister enough. Her family, in a drawer in that place for thirteen years.
There had seemed to be a lot more going on today when she arrived at the police station. Two patrol cars were parked at the front and as she sat there wondering what to do next she became aware of the buzz and crackle of urgent communication. A series of uniformed officers went in and came out with purpose, like drones at a hive. She remembered the police car out on the marsh and it coiled in her gut. Just leave it, forget it. Go to the wedding, go back to London, forget it.
But instead she opened the door and got out, came round the police cars. As she approached the tinted reinforced glass of the station’s door Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford was coming out, her face clouded.
‘No,’ she said, when she saw Alison’s face. ‘No, I—’ and she stopped. The policeman Jennings stood beside her. His tie was straighter today but he looked older, weary and pouchy-eyed, and as his eyes met Alison’s Rutherford turned between them, deflecting him.
‘Ma’am…’ he said, resisting, but Sarah Rutherford stood firm.
‘You go on, get in,’ she said to him, gesturing to the car. ‘There’s something I’ve forgotten. Five minutes.’ And then she was shepherding Alison ahead of her, back inside.
Rutherford hesitated as they passed down a corridor. ‘Wait here,’ she said and disappeared through a door. When she came back she had the brown envelope in her hand, then they were back inside the room with the high window, and it was just the two of them, the door closed. They didn’t sit.
‘This isn’t how it should work,’ said Rutherford, her back against the door. ‘You know that, don’t you? You should have put in an official request. Perhaps you should have talked to a lawyer while you were at it.’ A hand to her head. ‘Perhaps I should.’ Alison stood in front of her, dumb, staring at the envelope. ‘I’m only doing it—’ Rutherford broke off. ‘Christ knows why I’m doing it. Because I remember you.’ Roughly she thrust the envelope at Alison. ‘You don’t have to look at them, just because you’ve got them. Do you have someone – someone who can be with you?’
Alison nodded slowly, thinking, No. Not in a million years. ‘Yes,’ she managed, her voice rusty.
‘Because there’s something else you need to know,’ Rutherford said.
Alison looked down at the envelope in her hands. ‘My father,’ she began, ‘was he—’
But the woman interrupted her. ‘Not him,’ she said. ‘Not about him. About the twins.’
Alison hugged the envelope to her chest. ‘What,’ she said. Not really asking, not wanting to know, suddenly. ‘What.’
Now she sat there, in the car, watching the door to the police station. Rutherford had climbed into a waiting patrol car, not turning to acknowledge her but as the car moved away Alison saw Jennings’s upturned face, curious, in the passenger seat. They were going back down to the village, to Mulville’s Hard, where the body had been found.
‘Do they know I’m here?’ she’d asked Rutherford as they left the room with its high window. Under her breath. ‘Who knows?’
The Crooked House Page 11